So why HAS Jodie Foster left her lesbian lover of 15 years?

As the news spread, the words "mid-life crisis" were heard being whispered over expensively whipped hot drinks and wholemeal muffins in fashionable coffee shops across Hollywood; it certainly left the entire lesbian community of Los Angeles thoroughly agog.

For it was revealed that Jodie Foster, the charismatic and discreet movie star, had dramatically ditched Cydney Bernard - her lesbian lover of more than 15 years - for a flavour-of-the-month writer who could not be more different from her former girlfriend.

New love: Jodie with Cynthia Mort

Cynthia Mort, 33, who also goes by the name Cindy, is a highly intelligent, high-profile writer, who has made a name for herself by presenting America with the most explicit sex scenes ever screened as part of a sitcom.

Bright, beautiful and with an infectious laugh, Cindy is a rising star of the pink mafia.

She made her way in the business as a writer on the TV show Roseanne, where she worked for four years in the late 1990s, and later returned as the supervising producer.

In the meantime she wrote Tell Me You Love Me, a show for HBO about couples in therapy, which garnered an enormous amount of publicity for its frank depiction of sex.

She also served as the executive producer of the extremely successful show Will And Grace.

Now she is writing a biographical movie about the singer Nina Simone, which is set to star Mary J Blige.

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The relationship with Jodie Foster seems to have taken root when they met two years ago on the set of the The Brave One - a film for which Mort had co-written the screenplay. Now they are preparing to set up home together.

"The affair heated up last year, and the pair have been seeing each other since then," a source said yesterday.

"She must have plain bowled Jodie over," said a fellow writer. She added that Mort was "very successful, and very keen to be in the public eye - quite a loud person, a show-off type".

Cindy Mort certainly appears to love media attention - which in the current circumstances may be a plus.

(A short while ago she penned a comment piece for one of America's stuffier publications about why seeing a penis on screen should be no more shocking than seeing a breast.)

Split: Jodie with ex-girlfriend Cydney Bernard

And while Jodie's old love Cydney was a slightly frumpy older woman, a weather-beaten blonde who had been content to ditch her career for the past 11 years to devote herself to Jodie and their boys, in her new lover Jodie has chosen a media- savvy powerhouse.

Her youthful Mediterranean looks (strong brows, dark hair as shiny as a conker) are the precise opposite of Cydney's wholesomeness.

No one would accuse Cydney of being stylish - she favours plain jeans and preppy men's shirts - while Cindy cuts a dash in skinny black designer trousers and tight tops.

"Look, everyone thought that Jodie and Cydney were for ever," a Hollywood insider told the Mail.

"This was a romance which sailed totally under the radar and was completely happy. People are astonished that Jodie has dumped her. Mid-life crisis? Well, that would be one way to explain it."

Indeed, some worry that Jodie Foster is risking an unpleasant "galimony" battle - like Martina Navratilova and her lover Judy Nelson.

When they split up in 1991, Nelson sued the tennis player for £7million; the wrangle was eventually settled out of court.

Some showbusiness observers have predicted that the dumped Cydney, who has been with Foster for 15 years, will come after her former partner for money and, perhaps, joint custody of the two children Charlie and Kit, whom they have raised.

That, though, is said by better placed sources to be "unlikely".

The former couple have apparently already agreed to raise the boys together. Indeed, Cydney and Jodie are still living together while Jodie makes plans to move out.

What a sad end for a romance which was, for many years, as happy as it was private.

Speaking openly about it for the first time five months ago, Jodie Foster paid tribute to "beautiful Cydney, who sticks with me through all the rotten and the bliss".

Their lesbian partnership seemed to be the very model of a modern same-sex pairing.

Jodie had the babies, which were conceived with the help of a sperm donor who is generally recognised to have been her friend Randy Stone, a gay film director.

She and Cydney then raised them in the suburban comfort of West Hollywood, where they had dogs, went for walks in the local park and lived as an utterly "regular" family.

They had been together for five years before Jodie had her first son, Charles, and by that time Cydney and her were wearing matching Tiffany eternity rings.

Kit was born three years later, in 1998.

From time to time, Jodie would make a movie, but mostly she and Cydney stayed at home, taking Charlie and Kit for picnics, whizzing them to school in one of the couple's matching convertible BMWs, and every now and then going for a big family holiday to Europe or the Caribbean.

Occasions like Thanksgiving and Christmas were especially big deals; Foster's mother Brandy would come along as well.

Jodie liked to collect fancy kitchen goods, and also had a fondness for buying arty black-and-white photographs.

Both women enjoyed yoga, while Jodie was also into kick-boxing and karate.

They shared the same views about parenting, both being devotees of preparing meals from scratch using organic food.

Friends say Miss Foster has refused to employ household staff for fear that details of her home life would leak out.

She refuses to answer the telephone and until recently did not even have a mobile phone. There is a good reason for her to exercise extreme caution about her public profile.

She has remained terrified of stalkers, ever since John Hinckley attempted to assassinate U.S. president Ronald Reagan in 1981 and claimed he had planned the killing to impress her.

Some publications have said that, like her character in the 2002 hit Panic Room, she has installed a fortified safe area in the house.

Whatever the truth of that, she was certainly determined to raise the children in an atmosphere of emotional stability.

The children shared their names: both had the middle name Bernard and the family name Foster. It was a statement about the permanence of the arrangement.

Rumours spread that when the time was right the couple might even formalise their romance with a gay wedding, as and when such a ceremony became legal - which it did in California this month.

Perhaps they found that, as time went on, the career imbalance was rather tricky to handle.

Cydney, who had a pretty lowly role in the 1993 film Sommersby, worked on the film Loch Ness in 1996 as a production manager, and was the production manager on the smash hit Mr Bean movie, Bean, the following year.

But that was really the last time she worked: since then she has only one credit to her name, producing a solitary episode of the lesbian sitcom The L Word. She was the stay-at-home mother.

Meanwhile, Jodie Foster has been struggling slightly to keep her incredible career afloat.

A child star, whose performance in Taxi Driver was memorably disturbing, she went on to win two Oscars as an adult, for her performances in The Accused and The Silence Of The Lambs.

But Sommersby was - apart from the utterly strange Anna And The King in 1999 - her last romantic lead.

It may be that she had lost her taste for them. Certainly her age (45) counts against her.

Or perhaps she - and movie executives - decided that her well-known Sapphic leanings would make it hard for her to be taken seriously.

And so she has seen actresses who have lesser rang - like Julia Roberts - take the money and the glory while she has kept on repeating her role as a plucky mum or survivor (Panic Room, The Brave One, Flightplan).

She has been paid £6million to £7million a movie which, although a fortune, is less than Angelina Jolie, for example.

And actresses like Cate Blanchett and Nicole Kidman are offered their pick of the more interesting films.

It must be said, also, that Jodie Foster is a thoroughly unusual woman: the sole breadwinner for her single-parent family from the age of three, incredibly intelligent, and not given to any expressions of emotion.

"It is not my personality to be extroverted emotionally," she told an interviewer. "So acting has been really helpful to me."

She was the youngest of four children, and her parents split up when her mother was pregnant.

She was raised in a household led by her ambitious mother, who was in a lesbian relationship with "Auntie" Jo.

Her brother Buddy said that mum Brandy was a controlling woman, but Jodie clearly does not agree - she was so appalled by the book he wrote on the subject of their childhood that she hasn't spoken to him in 12 years.

Jodie once said on the subject: "When it's your responsibility to put bread on the table, crying is out of the question. No one says that to you, but you just know."

She added: "Look, it's terrible, I know, but weakness really, really bugs me, to the point that if there is a wounded bird on the sidewalk, I look at it and I go: 'I think I'll just kick it.'"

Perhaps one should not be surprised, then, by this latest rather ruthless act in her life.